I'm reading "The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, & the Birth of the Modern World" by Edward Dolnick and wanted to share this quote with you.
"Leibniz was perhaps the last man who thought it was possible to know everything. The universe was perfectly rational, he believed, and its every feature had a purpose. With enough attention you could explain it all, just as you could deduce the function of every spoke and spring in a carriage. For Leibniz, one of the greatest philosophers of the age, this was more than a demonstration of almost pathological optimism (though it was that, too). More important, Leibniz’s faith was a matter of philosophical conviction. The universe had to make perfect sense because it had been created by an infinitely wise, infinitely rational God. To a powerful enough intellect, every true observation about the world would be self-evident, just as every true statement in geometry would immediately be obvious. In all such cases, the conclusion was built in from the start, as in the statement “all bachelors are unmarried.” We humans might not be clever enough to see through the undergrowth that obscures the world, but to God every truth shines bright and clear. In fact, though, Leibniz felt certain that God had designed the world so that we can understand it. Newton took a more cautious stand. Humans could read the mind of God, he believed, but perhaps not all of it. “I don’t know what I may seem to the world,” Newton famously declared in his old age, though he knew perfectly well, “but, as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” Newton’s point was not simply that some questions had yet to be answered. Some questions might not have answers, or at least not answers we can grasp. Why had God chosen to create something rather than nothing? Why had He made the sun just the size it is? Newton believed that such mysteries might lie beyond human comprehension. Certainly they were outside the range of scientific inquiry. “As a blind man has no idea of colors,” Newton wrote, “so have we no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things.” Leibniz accepted no such bounds. God, he famously declared, had created the best of all possible worlds. This was not an assumption, in Leibniz’s view, but a deduction. God was by definition all-powerful and all-knowing, so it followed at once that the world could not have been better designed. (Even for one of the ablest of all philosophers, this made for an impossible tangle. If logic compelled God to create the very world we find ourselves in, didn’t that mean that He had no choice in the matter? But surely to be God meant to have infinite choice?)"
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